This poem originally appeared in Invitation: A One-shot Anthology of Speculative Fiction. It was subsequently nominated in the 2025 Aurora Awards for Best Poem/Song. I am making it available online so that everyone can enjoy. Bon appétit!
Cthulhu on the Shores of Osaka
The Eldritch God drifts
in coastal waters,
stretching barnacled tentacles
toward a beach of white-gold sand.
Through galaxies and black holes
he’d been called;
Cthulhu goes
only where invited.
Once he had been invoked
by absolute despair,
by abnormal horror,
by the terror and ravenous imagination
of a feeble man.
This time (he
sensed)
the call smelled different, tasted
different.
That great gelatinous head
rose from the waves
and released the wordless song that had devoured comets,
devoured stars,
sent wizened poets to despair.
Upon the nascent stones of the beach
he spread
his multitude limbs,
the squish of grasping suckers.
He awaits
for the despairing to fall to their knees
to claw off oily clumps of hair and bloodied bits of scalp,
to scream.
Scream they do,
if little else.
The Eldritch God
knows every tongue
so he understands when they say,
“Incredible! Magnificent! Such size!”
One steps closer,
lifting an iron butcher’s cleaver.
“Perfect!”
Sunlight
on a heavy blade,
quick swing,
clean cut.
The Eldritch God
does not bleed.
Slurp.
One sucker
tugged into the man’s mouth,
sucked down his gullet
screaming all the way—
because Cthulhu feels
even when severed.
Until tentacle flesh loses a battle
to stomach acid
(pH approaching 1.5).
The man nods approval,
hacks off more flesh
—an entire segment of tentacle—
and stumbles from the weight of his prize.
The Eldritch God scrabbles, grabs, misses.
Cthulhu
cannot go further,
uninvited and unfeared.
Even gods
become beached,
become grounded.
The man vanishes,
returns
with balls of battered wheat flour
that he feeds a scraggy companion.
“See, what did I say? Octopus
over marinated meat!”
From his words
spawn a storm
of knives and nets,
of carving and arguing,
of sundered god-flesh and ineffectual echoes of cosmic terror.
The Eldritch God
is partitioned,
divided,
devoured,
some parts frozen and stored
for later use.
He chants spectral litanies
which fall upon deaf ears,
cotton-balled already
with more Elder(ly) Gods
or perhaps only culinary obsession.
Sometimes Cthulhu awakens
in pH approaching 1.5,
reaches delicate feelers to a receptive mind,
induces a sweet moment of madness,
and dreams of the stars.
But mostly,
the God slumbers
in lakes of acid,
in cellars beneath the ice,
in a street vendor’s magnum opus,
in little corners of history
where eldritch songs are welcome and powerless.
